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Community Manager
October 25, 2018
Open for Voting

P: Modifying font and font size in the interface

  • October 25, 2018
  • 180 replies
  • 52699 views

I would like to be able to change the font and font size across the board in the interface. it is WAY to small for my old eyes

180 replies

Ann Bens
Community Expert
October 21, 2024

The only thing that get enlarged is the contextual and dropdown menus. The rest of the UI remains unchanged.

XilburQost
Inspiring
October 21, 2024

I work with Windows 11 and it does have a built-in magnifying glass feature which I occasionally find helpful in some situations, but it's not at all practical when working with Premiere Pro. Windows 11 also allows you to change font scaling in the OS, which is a wonderful accomodation, but that has no effect on Premiere or any other Adobe product.

Community Expert
October 19, 2024

Stan, I figured there must be a similar option in Windows.   

 

This is what makes this place so valuable... 

 

The absolute dismissal of the possibility that there might be a way to make this work in windows, was daunting... 

 

if you spend any amount of time here, you quickly learn who you can trust...   and was wondering who Helene was for a few minutes.  

 

That said, yes this is a workaround that's not ideal, but my macstudio with an apple thunderbolt monitor and the easy access to the zoom feature makes it workable.   I started wearing glasse for extreme nearsightedness in the first grade...  had black and blue marks on my nose because my glasses were so heavy in the days before plastic lenses, dwas almost legally blind before I had my cataracts fixed maybe 5 years ago...   so I sympathize with everyone having difficulty reading the screen.   But this forum is about asking questions, and helping others...  and between my solution for Mac and Stan's for Windows,  hopefully we've helped a few people.    

 

People, think about how scaling the fonts etc in the interface is gonna impact so many things...  as it is, we see people complaining here because in certain screen resolutions, the save, continue, whatever options. are not on the screen.   So in some ways, the zoom feature is the ideal solution.    And so many people are using so many different combinations of hardware that it's gotta be a conundrum for Adobe to know how to proceed.  

 

Trying to remember how I discovered the zoom feature...  Feels like it's been years...   but digging into the OS and all the settings can be really valuable, not to mention all the possibilities in Premiere...    

Stan Jones
Community Expert
October 19, 2024

@Michael Grenadier,

 

You posted the option for accessibility/magnifier for mac. In Windows, Settings -> "ease of use" -> Magnifier - does similar things. I'll discuss it in more detail below.

 

I have great sympathy for all the users who were using the — to work around this problem. But it's gone, and we need to find a way to move on, including upvoting this Idea to provide direct control of these variables.

 

I rarely use anything other than a largish UHD monitor that works just fine for me, but Helene forced me onto my surface pro and a MUCH smaller workspace. So a few comments from that perspective.

 

The Surface Pro (omg I don't recall which model) is a 12.25 inch monitor which I am running at the (recommended) 2736 x 1824. When I tried to reduce the resolution (I don't recall by what, it may have been simple HD resolution), it was below the PR requirement.

I am going on a major trip soon and will be working on it using Lightroom and PR. So I am motivated to look at this issue.

 

For the record, I am old, have always been very near-sighted, and age-related chances have not helped much. But I have progressive lenses that provide very good correction. And I can work on the Surface in PR 2025. But it often requires careful attention and, if I were working in a production environment, would be fatiguing and difficult.

 

I have the setting for scaling ("Change the size of text, apps, and other items") at 200% (Recommended), and no advanced/custom scaling (which has caused issues in the past). Today, I changed Setting -> Ease of Access/Display -> "Make text bigger" to 125% (percent appears as you adjust). 150% creates too much text running into images etc.

 

NONE of these changes affect all the text in PR. For example, font size in the Transcript tab is controlled by the Font size slider. Font size in the Project Panel is controlled by the 3 line/hamburger menu font size option. Panel tab headers are not affected. Menu commands at the top do respond.

 

Also today, in PR, I used Edit -> Preferences -> Appearance, and set Color Theme to Darkest and Accessible color contrast to "on."

I looked again today at the Windows magnifier option. Like any aid, it has a learning curve. It is an easy on/off (Start + [Plus] and Start + [Minus]). There are numerous modes and settings. Today, I used only these few:

 

Speed 150
Zoom increments 25%
Zoom 150%

Lens mode with 60 wide 70 high

 

This works pretty well, in part since keyboard shortcuts work as if the magnifier is not there.

 

Occasionally, Start + Minus does not exit magnifier mode, but there is a small window that can be x'd out.

 

Stan

 

R_N_C
Known Participant
October 19, 2024

uh... all we want is to be able to read the words on the monitor.  Its not that complicated nor worth more than one or two paragraphs.  

R Neil Haugen
Brainiac
October 19, 2024

Making comments about a variety of things can really weaken your main point, if the other comments are well ... not solid, perhaps.

 

Such as your Ai comment. The "Ai' is actually of course machine learning. And is used for such things as the incredibly popular text based editing process. The transcription process used is based off machine learning.

 

And a lot of the users are using the Ai things already. I've tested a couple, including the 'generative extend', myself, and that is something that as it is, is sometimes useful, and will get better.

 

And when it is useful, it can save your bacon.

 

One of the first things to understand is that we are all different, and we all work differently.

 

Something you find ridiculous might be used by someone else in a way you didn't know of, and be incredibly useful. That is constant in pro video post workflows.

 

So, I would suggest allowing that others will have vastly different viewpoints than yours. In fact, as I do, I would suggest you expect that everyone will have a different viewpoint and different working processes than you.

 

As it is both actually accurate ... and gets more polite discussions amongst users. Which are truly fascinating and informative when people are simply polite and accept they are unique.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
XilburQost
Inspiring
October 19, 2024

I'm sorry if the community volunteers are getting grief, but who else is there to reach out to? I presume Adobe is okay with enlisting volunteers as cannon fodder while the Adobe app coders comfortably busy themselves with who knows what? More dubious AI features? They in turn are being directed by their apparently clueless managers. It would be nice to chat with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen; maybe he could help?

Community Expert
October 19, 2024

and I don't think anyone who's not on the programming team at adobe has a clue as to how complex the program is and how changes can have unpredictable and unintended consequences.    Every decade or so, developers of software this complex will decide to rebuild the software from the ground up to take advantage of advances in hardware and operating systems ...  if they're nice people, they maintain the previous user interface, if they're the spawn of satan they throw the baby out with the bath water...   

R Neil Haugen
Brainiac
October 19, 2024

How about actually reading the words we've written?

 

"We" volunteers cannot change the policy on mentioning --, and in truth, there's good reason for most users to stay the flip outta there. As someone who's helped around here over a decade, I've had a bunch of times where I needed to go to the private messages to get someone sorted who really, really mucked up their ability to get anything done.

 

Past that, all the community types I've seen would love to have the UI font size control added. "We" tend to give practical comments as to what you can, as a user, do now, just to get working.

 

That never implies any of us would not want the change requested. It's just a practical comment.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
Known Participant
October 19, 2024

Hi!. I have upgraded to the 2025 version of Premiere and what is my surprise of a new UI that is very very very tiny in my system display (LG C4 48") (attached a capture to see it)

Well, adobe have deleted the option in this new version!!!

 

WHY!?. I don´t know, but seriously, I CANNOT work with this TINY font size!!!. And the suggestion to do the scale in Windows is awful, because ALL apps and UI of Windows will be too huge in comparishon!

 

PLEASE, Adobe, do the right thing, allow us to make this trick or add an option to scale the font size of Adobe Premiere, because I cannot work with this anymore 😞

Carson Jones
Known Participant
October 19, 2024

Adding my voice to the mix here... Adobe does anyone on your team actually use the software for actual production projects or are they only 'designing' the apps? Noticing in both Premiere 2025 and After Effects 2025 that we can no longer adjust the UI font size based on our systems. Seems like there always has to be some kind of major user experience feature that gets broken for every major update.

Please fix this since it does make the new releases basically unusable for many of us. Also, please stop releasing beta software. This should have been caught and resolved well before this ever became an issue.

R Neil Haugen
Brainiac
October 19, 2024

Ok, I understand, but I'm sure that the vast majority of Adobe workers who use Adobe Premiere for whatever purpose, whether they are programmers or editors, do not have a 4K monitor at 4K resolution to see Premiere "in all its greatness" in terms of UI.

 

Either they do some kind of "trick" or they convince themselves that that tiny text in the interface is fine. It's not, anyone who works in UX/UI world knows it's WRONG. But they seem to ignore this fact. The reason? No idea, but it's worrying. Years and years of people saying it here and NONE at Adobe do nothing to fix this.


Lose the assumptions. They have a wide range of rigs to do both development and testing on. Intentionally. Across many countries, also. I keep learning of large Adobe offices in places I didn't know about.

 

But again, they do test on a remarkably wide range of gear because of the range of gear the app is used on. Including monitors. So in person, they can talk of how certain monitor sizes and scalings affect visibility of screen elements.

 

So your assumptions about either their experiences and/or motivations are invalid, in my experience and my personal awareness of some of the people.

 

And they are totally irrelevant to the main discussion anyway, so why go there? That I just don't understand. Setting motivations or whatever to people you don't know always seemed pointless to me.

 

They disagree with you and me. Ok? And based on their user data, they apparently don't see the troubles thee & me have as something we can't easily enough overcome with "local" means.

 

That we disagree with them is also clear. And ... that we need to convince them to appreciate our view more than they currently do.

 

Stick to that. It will in the end be more effective.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...